As I’ve told folks on Twitter, I’m a judge in American Express OPEN’s “Big Break” program, a Facebook promotion that is offering five worthy small businesses a chance to fly to Facebook HQ and get a complete “business makeover,” as well as $20,000 in cash.

As someone who has started five or so small businesses, I know the power of a helping hand at the right time, heck, I know the power of just organizing oneself to enter a contest like this. Just doing the work of communicating why your business is worthy of support from someone else is an exercise that can yield benefits all on its own.

And every one of us knows a small business that we love and want to support, I know about ten, in fact. I’ve been telling them about this program, and encouraging them to sign up. I hope you will do the same.

But time is running out. The deadline to enter is this Friday, May 20th.

Entry is fairly straightforward and simple – a three part questionnaire, a photo upload portion, and contact information. The entry questions are listed below:

“Tell us about your business. What makes you excited to come to work every day?”

“How do you envision Facebook impacting your business?”

“How could a Big Break help your business and your customers?”

25-30 semifinalists will be narrowed down to 10 finalists, followed by 5 community-chosen winners. The prize is as follows:

• 10 finalists, as determined by judging, will:

• Be filmed and have a video created by American Express for use in community vote

• Receive $2,500 in Facebook ad credits

• 5 winners, as determined by community voting, will each receive:

• A trip to Facebook headquarters for a two-day Facebook business makeover

• $20K to grow their business

• Opportunity to appear in OPEN Facebook webisodes

As most of you know, American Express OPEN Forum is jointly produced by my company, FM, but I’m promoting this program because I believe in it. So if you run a small business, or know and love someone who does, encourage them to apply!

Here’s the last week in Signal for all you 315,000 or so Searchblog RSS readers (THANK YOU, btw!)

Monday Signal: WTF!!!

Tuesday Signal: The Best Marketing Conference, Ever

Weds. Signal: Google Beats The Android Drum, Microsoft Buys Skype

Thursday Signal: It’s All Google, But It’s Not All Good

Friday Signal: Is Apple Killing the Bees?

Monday Signal: Pay Me To Watch That Ad!

Today we announced the first tranche of speakers for this year’s Web 2 Summit conference, Oct. 17-19 at the Palace Hotel. It’s a great group, but we’re really only getting started. I’m mixing up the programming approach quite a bit this year, with no panels and a lot more short, impactful High Order Bits and data visualizations. Right now we have 26 or so speakers confirmed, but I expect we’ll be at nearly three times that by the time we’re done. The program is going to be BANG BANG BANG, not that it dragged in the past….

One new thing I’ll be doing as well is forming an advisory board. More on that soon, but my goal is to gather input on the program from a diverse set of voices. This is something I did way back when we started in 2004, it felt right to do it again.

You’ll notice the lineup has a fair share of the industry heavyweights you might expect me to interview (Steve Ballmer, Dick Costolo, Steven Elop, Michael Dell, etc), as well as some names that perhaps you have not heard of (Intel anthropologist Genevieve Bell, “The Information” author James Gleick, etc.). In the coming months, I’ll be announcing new additions pretty frequently, mainly through Twitter, so if you want to stay on top of them, follow me or the Web 2 Summit handle.

Below are the speakers in visual form.

Registration is open, if you want to come, now’s the time, as you get a far better price. We’ve sold out registration every year since 2004.The link at left includes the discount, which lasts, if I recall, only for a short time. Hope to see you there!

Many of you probably remember the “Points of Control” Web 2 Summit Map from last year, it was very well received. Hundreds of thousands of folks came to check it out, and the average engagement time was north of six minutes per visitor. It was a really fun way to make the conference theme come to life, and given the work that went into its creation, we thought it’d be a shame to retire it simply because Web 2 has moved on to a new theme.

As I posted last week, this year’s theme is “The Data Frame.” From my updated verbiage describing the theme:

For 2011, our theme is “The Data Frame” - focusing on the impact of data in today’s networked economy. We live in a world clothed in data, and as we interact with it, we create more – data is not only the web’s core resource, it is at once both renewable and boundless.

How, I wondered, might we update the Points of Control map such that it can express this theme? Well, first of all, it’s clear the game is still afoot between the major players. Some boundaries may have moved, and progress has been made (Bing has gained search share, Facebook and Google have moved into social commerce, etc.), but the map in essence is intact as a thought piece.

Then it struck me – each of the major players, and most of the upstarts, have as a core asset in their arsenals *data*, often many types of it. In addition, most of them covet data that they’ve either not got access to, or are in the process of building out (think Google in social, for example, or in deals, which to my mind is a major play for local as well as purchase data.) Why not apply the “Data Frame” to the map itself, a lens of sorts that when overlaid upon the topography, shows the data assets and aspirations of each player?

So here’s where you come in. If we’re going to add a layer of data to each player on the map, the question becomes – what *kind* of data? And how should we visualize it? My initial thoughts on types of data hew somewhat to my post on the Database of Intentions, so that would include:

- Purchase Data (including credit card info)

- Search Data (query, path taken, history)

- Social Graph Data (identity, friend data)

- Interest Data (Likes, tweets, recommendations, links)

- Location Data (ambient as well as declared/checked in)

- Content Data (Journey through content, likes, engagement, “behavioral”)

Those are some of the big buckets. Clearly, we can debate if, for example, identity should be its own category, separate from social, etc, and that’s exactly the kind of argument I hope to spark. I’m sure I’ve missed huge swaths of landscape, but I’m writing this in a rush (have a meeting in five minutes!) and wanted to get the engine started, so to speak.

I’m gathering a small group of industry folks at my home in the next week to further this debate, but I most certainly want to invite my closest collaborators – readers here at Searchblog, to help us out as we build the next version of the map. Which, by the way, will be open sourced and ready for hacking….

So please dive into comments and tell me, what are the key categories of data that companies are looking to control?

If you’ve been reading my musings these past few months, you may have noticed an increasing fascination with data. Who owns it (the creator, the service, both? Who has access to it – ISPs? Device makers? Marketers? The government? And how are we as an industry leveraging data to create entirely new classes of services?

Well, expect a lot more musing here, because (finally!) we’re ready to announce the theme for the Web 2 Summit, 2011, and it’s this: The Data Frame. From my overview, just posted on the site:

For Summit 2010, we noted that the Web ecosystem had shifted into something of a battlefield, with both major players and upstarts jockeying for lead positions around key “Points of Control.” Looking back at our theme one year later, it’s clear the game is still in its early phases – most of the major players have held their ground and continue to press into new territory. Meanwhile, the cycle of startup creation has intensified and compressed.

Given all this, we’re tempted to simply declare 2011 “Points of Control, The Sequel.” But we’ve noticed a constant uniting nearly all the battles around these strategic regions. That constant? How companies (and their customers) leverage data.

In our original Web 2.0 opening talk, as well as in Tim’s subsequent paper “What is Web 2.0,” we outlined our short list of key elements defining the emergent web economy. Smack in the middle of that list is this statement: “Data Is the Next Intel Inside.” At the time, most of us only vaguely understood the importance of this concept. Three years ago we noted the role of data when “Web Meets World,” and two years ago, we enlarged upon it with “WebSquared.”

This year, data has taken center stage in the networked economy. We live in a world clothed in data, and as we interact with it, we create more – data is not only the web’s core resource, it is at once both renewable and infinite. No longer tethered to the PC, each of us bathes in a continuous stream of data, in real time, nearly everywhere we go.

In the decade since search redefined how we consume information, we have learned to make the world a game and the game our world, to ask and answer “what’s happening,” “what’s on your mind,” and “where are you?” Each purchase, search, status update, and check-in layers our world with data. Billions of times each day, we pattern a world collectively created by Twitter, Zynga, Facebook, Tencent, Foursquare, Google, Tumblr, Baidu, and thousands of other services. The Database of Intentions is scaling to nearly incomprehensible size and power.

Of course, this fact raises serious issues of consumer privacy, corporate trust, and our governments’ approach to balancing the two. As we learn to leverage this ever-shifting platform called the Internet, we are at once renegotiating our social, economic, and cultural relationships – and we’re doing it in real time. How we interact with each other, how we engage with our government, how we conduct business, and even how we understand our place in the world – all has changed in the short two decades since the dawn of the commercial Internet. And all of this is described through a matrix of data, the power of which our culture is only beginning to recognize.

At the Web 2 Summit 2011, we’ll use data as a framing device to understand the state of the web. We know that those who best leverage data will win. So who’s winning, and how? Who’s behind? In each of our key points of control such as location, mobile platforms, gaming, content, social – who is innovating, and where are the opportunities? What new classes of services and platforms are emerging, and what difficult policy questions loom? And what of the consumer – will users become their own “point of control,” and start to understand the power of their own data?

These are some of the questions we’ll be asking and answering at the 8^th annual Web 2 Summit. We look forward to exploring them together.

Web 2 Summit 2011

The Palace Hotel San Francisco

Oct. 17-19, 2011

* And yes, we’ll be updating our “Points of Control” Map with a new layer – the Data layer, naturally.

Federated Media is proud to present the sixth annual Conversational Marketing Summit, June 6-7 at the fabulous Hudson Theater in the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Times Square. The preliminary agenda is now up, more is coming, but you can get a pretty good sense of the lineup – it’s amazing.
This year’s CM Summit will bridge the conversations of FM’s regional Signal conferences on one stage, bringing together the topics of content marketing, location services, mobile, data, and the real-time web onto one stage.

See our initial agenda, now live on the site.

The rise of digital platforms present massive opportunities, but one significant challenge: finding the signal in an increasingly noisy ecosystem of sites, apps, and services. Audiences fragmented between usage on Facebook and Twitter are constantly faced with new services like Groupon, Foursquare, Color, and SimpleGeo. How can we, as marketers, help our customers find the signal that’s right for them? CM Summit we will dive into a day and half of rapid-fire case studies, insightful one-on-one conversations, and dynamic High Order Bits that will help brands, agencies, and marketers better understand consumer trends, experiences and industry signals.  

Join the conversation! This event always sells out.
REGISTER TODAY and get your early-bird pricing, available only until this Friday, April 22. Special thanks to our event sponsors: RIM, AT&T, Google, Quantcast, Demand Media, Facebook, Outbrain, Pandora, R2integrated, Slideshare, Yahoo!, AOL, Mobile Roadie, Spiceworks, Ustream; and our partners: IAB, Mashable, SMAC, and paidContent.
We look forward to seeing you this June 6-7 in New York!
Please visit our site for hotel booking details, a full list of speakers, and more event details.

We’re very excited to announce the theme and initial speaker lineup for our 6th annual Conversational Marketing Summit. The Summit will take place June 6-7th in New York City, at the Hudson Theater and Millennium Broadway Hotel.
Our theme is Finding the Signal. Speakers at our annual anchor event include Laura Desmond, CEO of Starcom MediaVest, Tim Westergren, Founder of Pandora, David Karp, Founder of Tumblr, Antonio Lucio, CMO of Visa, and Judy McGrath, Chair and CEO of MTV Networks. And that’s just for starters…see the full (and growing) list here.
We’ve taken our theme in the spirit of our regional Signal event series. Each Signal focuses on a key new area of digital marketing: Location, Real Time, Content, and Social. Finding the signal in an increasingly noisy eco-system of sites, mobile apps and services is increasingly difficult. At the CM Summit, we’ll cut through the clutter and offer up the very best and brightest for two robust days of case studies, insightful one-on-one conversations and compelling introductions of new products, start-ups and services.
Please join leading agencies, marketers, platforms and entrepreneurs in our industry’s most rigorous and thought-provoking annual gathering, the Conversational Marketing Summit.
Early-bird registration is open until April 22. Don’t wait, this event always sells out.
I look forward to seeing you in New York in June.
A very special thanks to our sponsor partners who make all this rich conversation and exploration possible: RIM, Google, Quantcast, Demand Media, Pandora, R2integrated, Slideshare,Yahoo, AOL, Mobile Roadie, Spiceworks and Ustream.

I’m a Guy Kawasaki fan, so this isn’t really a “review” as much as an appreciation for his new book Enchantment. I read it over this weekend, it’s the kind of book you could skim in an hour, or spend a lot of time with. I fell somewhere in the middle, stopping every so often to consider his advice and apply it to situations I find myself in all the time. (Disclosure: Guy works with my company FM in various ways, but I’m writing this mainly because Guy, in his enchanting way, asked me to blog my thoughts here.)

Enchantment is, in essence, a book of simple advice for succeeding in business, and I found myself agreeing with most of it. Guy is a folksy writer and he loves simple anecdotes, the book is full of them. I rolled my eyes when he encouraged us to “make a checklist,” or to smile when meeting someone, and smile with integrity at that. But he’s right, and I realized that every time I see Guy, or see pictures of him, he’s got the real deal smile working, and it really does work to put whoever he’s meeting into an open frame of mind.

Another little gem was his advice to get to know the public person you are about to meet with. I tell my sales team this all the time – nearly everyone in our business has a public face – flickr and twitter streams, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, etc. I’m always astounded when folks don’t take the time to get to know the people they’re trying to do business with. There’s almost always a shared story, passion, or anecdote buried in someone’s public lifestream, and taking the time to pay attention to that is always appreciated.

Guy wraps up all his advice in the concept of being “enchanting,” and I get the idea, but it seems to me it comes down to another simple rule: Be a good, highly engaged person, and expect those you work with to be the same. He ends the book with a warning about how not to become enchanted by those who seem to follow his advice, but are in reality just snake charmers. As we all know, there are plenty of those folks out there as well.

Many would benefit from reading Enchantment solely for Guy’s chapter on managing Twitter, he’s clearly a master at it. He follows that with advice on most of the other major platforms (Facebook, blogs, etc), and these alone would justify the purchase, to my mind. Get Guy’s book, it’s worth the investment.

I’ve fallen down in my promise to RSS readers out there (all 250K+ of you). I told you I’d post summaries of my Signal work each week, and it’s been more like each month. Well, here’s an attempt to rectify my failure, below, the past seven Signals. I’ll try to do this more often.

Monday Signal: The Moral Corporation?

Friday Signal: TGIF, no?

Thursday Signal: Yahoo’s Not Done Searching; Why Color Matters

Weds. Signal: Don’t Sell Out Your Twitter, Man

Tuesday Signal: Eat Yer Bran, Folks

Monday Signal: And Then There Were Three

If it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s RSS or email newsletter on the FM home page (upper right box).

I’ve agreed to be a judge in Intel’s Visual Life contest, the details of which can be found here. Intel has been a partner and supporter of both my work as well as Federated’s for as long as I can remember, and I was honored to join my former partner Chas Edwards, among many others, as a judge of the content.

The contest invites folks to upload visuals of their life – either photos or videos – and will have HP prizes in multiple countries for four different categories. I’m looking forward to reviewing them all. The full rules can be found here. I’m a bit late to the game, entries are due in just a few days, so get on it!